The Roundabout Yes radio edit that Atlantic Records quietly slipped onto American airwaves in early 1972 is one of the more quietly audacious moves in rock history: eight and a half minutes of interlocking, suite-like virtuosity compressed into just over three, without anyone in the band even knowing it had happened.
The song itself began on a bus somewhere between Aberdeen and Glasgow. Jon Anderson looked out at the Scottish mountains and lochs, clocked the sheer volume of roundabouts the driver was having to navigate, and filed it all away. He and Steve Howe later collated their lyrical and musical ideas in a hotel room in Scotland, building the skeleton of what would become the opening track and lead single from Fragile, Yes’s fourth album, released in 1971.
Building Roundabout piece by piece
‘We had all these bits of music,’ Howe recalled later. ‘I was big on intros back then, and the classical guitar intro I came up with for Roundabout was one of the most signature things.’ The pair brought the germ of the idea to the rest of the band during preparations for the recording sessions at Advision Studios in London, and what followed was the collaborative jigsaw process that defined how Yes worked.
Rick Wakeman, who had joined from the Strawbs for the Fragile sessions, described his role in stitching the fragments together. ‘We’d all bring along bits of the jigsaw, then between us we’d slot the pieces in,’ he said. ‘If a piece didn’t work, it would get slung away. Glueing it together became my job, in a strange way. All these little bits would be in different keys so we’d need chords over it. Bill said, “That’s Rick’s job. He went to the Royal College Of Music. We didn’t. He studied orchestration. We didn’t.”‘
The finished track is a procession of contrasts held in unlikely equilibrium. Wakeman’s reversed piano chord opens it. Chris Squire’s restless, funky bass and Bill Bruford’s jazz-inflected drums keep it moving through its unpredictable structure. Howe’s classical guitar and his R’n’B electric work vie with Wakeman’s organs and synths throughout, while Anderson delivers his stoner-pastoral lyrics about the Scottish landscape that sparked the whole thing.
The Roundabout Yes radio edit and its US breakthrough
When Atlantic Records got hold of it, they made a call the band knew nothing about. The label cut the track down from its full running time to just over three minutes for American radio. Anderson described hearing it for the first time while the band were driving through Pennsylvania. ‘Atlantic took out the scissors and cut it into a hit record… thankfully!’ he told Prog in 2016. ‘We were shocked at first, but now I think it was a gift. I remember we were driving through Pennsylvania and it came on the radio, and none of us knew it had been edited. We all sat up and said: “Wait a minute! What’s going on?” But of course it became a big breakthrough record for us, so thank you! Without that hit, Yes might not have stayed around very much longer.’
The single made no impression on the UK chart, but in the US it reached No.13 on the Billboard Hot 100. For a band whose music existed largely in the space between jazz, classical and psychedelia, that kind of commercial traction was not something to take lightly.
Fragile as a whole set the template for what Yes would do through their creative peak: individual sections spotlighting each member, grand collaborative centrepieces, a sound that was sprawling and precise at the same time. Roundabout sat at the centre of it, the track that announced what the band had become.
The song has stayed in the live set ever since, one of those pieces that simply cannot be left out. When Yes were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, they opened their performance with it. Geddy Lee stepped in to play Chris Squire’s bass parts, Squire having died two years previously. ‘Chris Squire was one of the most inventive-sounding bass players ever,’ Lee told a press conference. ‘So to play his parts… I mean, it’s one thing to mimic his parts (you can mimic anything if you practice it) but to write those parts is sheer brilliance. It was a great honour for me to step in.’ Fifty-plus years on from that Scottish bus journey, the roundabouts keep coming round.
